Changes ahead for e-voting; FL-13 controversy continues

In the wake of the Nov. 7 elections, Congress is considering some legislation …

The NYT is running a good piece on some of the e-voting legislation being proposed for the upcoming session of Congress. When the Democrats take power next year, they'll be considering legislation that federally mandates that all electronic voting machines produce some sort of voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). This would essentially outlaw touchscreen-only machines, a move that would see many counties either scrapping their touchscreens entirely or scrambling for a way to attach printers to the devices.

The legislation would also require electronic voting machines to be tested by federal inspectors, who would have access to the machines' source code. Vendors may even be required to open up their source code to the public, if some election transparency advocates have their way.

So if the new legislation goes through, it looks like we'll be on track to fix the main problems with electronic voting before the 2008 elections, right? Not so fast. Federal VVPAT and inspection requirements may seem to be a step in the right direction, but the devil, as usual, is in the details.

To take the VVPAT issue first, a general mandate from the feds requiring that voting machines produce some kind of paper trail could potentially make things worse, if the following rules aren't also enforced with some serious muscle behind them:

The VVPAT has to be printed on thick, archival-quality paper stock. The thin roll paper that's currently used on many electronic voting machines is fragile, prone to jamming and malfunction, and generally unsuitable for use in recording votes.

The VVPAT printer has to have a very low failure rate. The thermal roll printers currently in use on most machines have a very high failure rate, so increasing the number of such printers in use will mostly serve to increase the number of paper jams and machine malfunctions on election day.

There has to be plenty of ink and printer paper on hand at each precinct. The last thing we need is the creation of a new ink- or paper-based denial-of-service attack for election systems. In the same way that unscrupulous election officials have carried out targeted voter suppression by limiting the number of machines deployed in opposition precincts, one could just as easily send a ton of touchscreens and no backup ink or paper for recording ballots.

There must be a scrupulously enforced system for matching each paper vote record to a specific voting machine. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, many of the cannisters containing ballot printouts were completely unlabeled, so those ballots couldn't be matched to their machine of origin. An election fraudster could have printed out a few canisters worth of counterfeit ballots and dropped them off at the archive location with no one the wiser.

Procedures have to be in place to ensure that parts of the VVPAT aren't stolen, spoiled, or otherwise tampered with, as has happened in some counties in previous elections.

VVPATs are pointless if mandatory random audits are not conducted after each election.

I could expand the bullet list above with more recommendations, but my point should be clear by now: a law that simply mandates the presence of a VVPAT will have the general effect of introducing into the elections process yet another thing that can break or be tampered with. This because a VVPAT is not a technological "fix" that can be applied to a broken election to "patch" it so that it's more secure.

As is the case with all security problems everywhere, the flaws in our current elections systems are not solely technological, therefore a solely technological fix is completely inadequate. Our current voting integrity problems stem from a particular mix of technological, procedural, and political factors, so a solution that addresses only one aspect of the whole buys us nothing in terms of overall election integrity. Properly implemented VVPATs are just one critical critical component of any larger solution that takes all these factors into account.

So, to all activists, bloggers, and media types who're following this story: do not settle for a federally-mandated, federally-funded VVPAT requirement. By itself, such a thing is not a victory for elections security, and it only barely qualifies as a step in the right direction. We desperately need enforceable federal standards for everything from election procedures to voting machine technology to ballot design (more on this below).

I'm not talking about a federal takeover of national elections here; just enforceable, non-voluntary standards, much like what we have for highway safety, hospitals, meat processing, or anything else that actually matters to us.

Note that everything I've said here also applies equally to the proposed rule about federal inspections. If federal inspectors sign off on voting machine software, and then an unapproved patch is distributed at the last minute, then we may as well not have had inspections in the first place. Similarly, if access to the voting machines and the central tabulation server isn't strictly controlled, then again, inspections are pointless. Or, if the central tabulation server is connected to the Internet or a modem bank, and it's running an unpatched version of Windows, then who cares what the inspectors saw?

So just as is the case with the VVPAT requirement, a law that mandates federal inspections buys just a hair north of zero. It's just not enough, and if people settle for this, then we're back to square one.

Another bad Florida ballot design decides a national election

Evidence is mounting that the 18,000 undervotes in the House race in Sarasota County (FL-13) were due not to voting machine malfunction, but to poor ballot design. The Herald Tribune's analysis of the race points strongly to ballot design as having cost Democrat Christine Jennings the race.

This analysis is corroborated by a lengthy report from a group out of Dartmouth, Rochester, and UCLA, entitled Ballot Formats, Touchscreens, and Undervotes: A Study of the 2006 Midterm Elections in Florida. Here's the abstract of that report:

The 2006 midterm elections in Florida have focused attention on undervotes, ballots on which no vote is recorded on a particular contest. This interest was sparked by the high undervote count? more than 18,000 total undervotes out of 240,000 ballots cast?in Florida?s 13th Congressional District race, a race decided by a total of 369 votes. Using a combination of ballot-level and precinct-level voting data, we show that the high undervote rate in the 13th Congressional District race was almost certainly caused by the way that Sarasota County?s electronic touchscreen voting machines placed the 13th Congressional District race above and on the same screen as the Florida Governor race. We buttress this claim by showing that extraordinarily high undervote rates were also observed in the Florida Attorney General race in Charlotte and Lee Counties, places where that race appeared below the Governor race on voting machine screens. Using a precinct-level statistical imputation model to identify and allocate excess undervotes, we find that there is a 90 percent chance that Sarasota undervotes were pivotal in the 13th Congressional District race. With more precise estimates that use ballot data, we find that there is essentially a 100 percent chance that Jennings would have won the CD 13 race had Sarasota voters voted in Charlotte County.

This is pretty bad news for the Jennings camp, because even if it is proven beyond a shadow of a statistical doubt that poor ballot design cost her the race, the courts and Congress (if the decision goes to the House) are going to be very reluctant to challenge the results of this election based on anything short of machine malfunction or deliberate fraud. As we saw in Florida in 2000, results that are influenced by a confusing ballot still stand, no matter what the stakes.

For my part, I think a revote would be fantastic for really raising the profile of the issue of ballot design, so that something can perhaps be done about it at the national level. I say this, because I believe the following two things would happen in the event of a re-vote.

First, there would be an enormous chorus of outrage from Vernon Buchanan (the Republican challenger, who "won" by 377 votes) and his colleagues, claiming that the will of the people has been thwarted, this is an affront to democracy, and so on. Buchanan is already saying all of this to anyone who'll let him on TV.

After the revote, Jennings would win by a hefty margin. At that point, the opposition would have to shut up about the "will of the people" being thwarted, because for the first time it would be abundantly clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that poor ballot design had (almost) decided an election.

If people really saw the electoral impact of user interface ballot design illustrated in such a dramatic fashion, then we might have the political will to draft and enforce some kind of guidelines for it at the national level.